"The Arts Company debuts a series of vibrant, expressive abstract mixed-media paintings by Nashville-based artist Cassidy Cole. Using line, color, texture and a process inspired by her background in improvisation, Cole explores her life experiences and the dynamic ways we we interact with the world around us."

Sara Estes stopped by the gallery to preview LaVon Williams' show for The Tennessean and here is what she had to say about it: "As a whole, Williams' art seems to respond to an innate desire to tell an important story about the triumphs and the sorrows of the African-American experience. 'He’s not just playing, he’s passionate,' said Brown. 'He can’t not do what he’s doing.'"Click HERE to read the full article.

Later this month, Nashville Opera will present Nashville’s first-ever Spanish-language opera, “Florencia en el Amazonas.” Along with the performances, a show of original art by nine local Hispanic artists — some well-established members of Nashville’s visual art community — will be displayed at four venues around the city over the next several months.

“Florencia en el Amazonas” the exhibition will be on view through Jan. 17 at The Arts Company. It will then be displayed at TPAC during the opera’s run, Jan. 23-27. After that, the work travels to the Noah Liff Opera Center, followed by a show at Casa Azafrán; dates for the last two exhibitions are yet to be determined.

“It’s not a huge show, but it’s a good show,” said Arts Company owner Anne Brown, whose staff curated the exhibit.

From the page

The idea to mount a visual arts show along with the opera production came out of programming discussions Nashville Opera had with Vanderbilt University’s Center for Latin American Studies, according to Nashville Opera’s Reed Hummell. A Metro Arts Commission grant is helping finance the exhibition.

“Florencia en el Amazonas,” the opera, is Daniel Catán’s adaptation based on the work of Gabriel García Márquez, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Colombian author who died last summer. In the story, a group of people steam down the Amazon River.

Surrounded by lush landscape — and in the opera by an appropriately lush musical score — the travelers must also contend with aspects of “magical realism,” a literary device often employed by García Márquez. In such stories, magical or otherwise fantastical elements interact with characters in real environments and situations.

“If you’ve ever read ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ it is magical realism from beginning to end,” said Marcela Gomez of the author’s well-known novel. Gomez, founder of the Hispanic Marketing Group, was brought on board to assist in reaching artists.

Magical realism informs many of the 25 artworks in the exhibit. In Liliana Velez’s photo-realistic painting “Monarch,” for example, a woman strums an acoustic guitar as butterflies flutter around her. One of the insects is shown coming to life from a butterfly tattoo on the woman’s arm.

Butterflies are also visible in Jairo Prado’s Fauvist-like “Journey to Macondo.” Prado’s colorful abstract paintings were visible behind President Obama during his December appearance at Casa Azafrán; the front of the building also displays one of Prado’s signature murals.

First, the group made a presentation at Casa Azafrán, and posted information on social media platforms. In addition to addressing themes from the opera, the artists were also given the option of expressing their experiences as Latinos in Nashville.

“Some of them are professional artists in the sense that that’s what they do full time and they do have studios,” Gomez said. “The rest of them are amateurs; we discovered these folks sort of randomly.”

Brown said the selection process has been typical in that artists were asked to present their qualifications, background and ideas for the pieces. It was important, Brown said, that the artists be able to produce the work in a relatively short amount of time.

“It’s been a collaborative effort, which I love,” Brown said. “It has worked very, very well for all of us.”

Submission guidelines were presented in English and Spanish, translated by Gomez, whose team also created a Spanish-language video for TPAC explaining parking and other performance information.

Nashville Opera recognized early on that this production was an “opportunity to engage the city’s growing Latino population,” Hummell wrote in an email. He added the organization is also committed to projects that bring new connections to opera.

Gomez said the teaming up of the groups — Nashville Opera, the Metro Arts Commission and The Arts Company and Conexión Américas (Casa Azafrán’s parent organization) — will help them reach larger and more diverse audiences than they would on their own.

Finding inspiration in catalogs is not unusual; after all, they exist to make us want the items we see there. Consumers are encouraged to imagine themselves in the rooms or to imagine the objects in their own homes. Mandy Rogers Horton takes that to another level; home décor and furniture catalogs are the starting points for imagined interiors — some quite grand and spacious — she renders in collage and paint.

A collection of her new works, “Patchwork and Frankenstein,” is on view at The Arts Company through Jan. 10.

This latest series of collages differs from Horton’s earlier ones primarily in scale, some reaching 44 inches by 90 inches.

Horton began working on the larger pieces upon receiving a commission for “At Home in Any Room,” which now hangs over the hostess stand in the Omni Nashville Hotel’s Kitchen Notes restaurant.

“It was so fun to get to work so large and to see the image that takes up your whole peripheral vision,” Horton said of enlarging the scene.

The original, smaller version of this collage is included in The Arts Company show and features a semicircle of chairs cut from various catalogs.

Thinking big

Working on larger pieces does present challenges for Horton, who works out of a small studio in her home. Her compositions often begin on her studio floor so she can spread out to see, as she puts it, how big the piece wants to be. She lays out the various chairs, windows and other components, then adheres them onto her designated surface.

Horton cuts images from catalogs (Restoration Hardware and West Elm are her current favorites) and magazines (Architectural Digest and Veranda), and maintains files of chairs sorted by size and direction faced, files of picture frames, etc.

The collages began as warm-up exercises when she’d paint on pages or combine images to create new scenes. Anne Brown of The Art Company wanted to show how Horton’s work has evolved, so she included earlier work in the show.

“This is how it started,” Brown said, referring to a couple of small scenes. One of these includes a “fake reflection” Horton created by marrying two similar images.

Rough around the edges

Optical illusions play a significant role in compositions like “Rebuilt From Scratch,” in which the artist conjures an expansive ballroom with Palladian windows and a tiled floor. Some of the windows are in fact upside down, some of the scene augmented with paint.

“I like some of that process to be available to the viewer so it’s not a mystery,” Horton said, “people can see that it’s collage, you can see parts that might be upside down or sideways. In “Good Bones,” text is also visible.

So far Horton has resisted using photocopiers or digital scans to manipulate the images. “At least at the moment, I like the collage and I like the limited vocabulary,” she said. “I can’t just make up a window or make up a chair; I’m limited to what I’ve already found and cut out. If I don’t have the necessary size of an object, I have to go digging for it in a magazine.”

Working with cut-out paper also brings in a degree of imperfection, which Horton said echoes the way new objects acquire a lived-with look once they are brought into our homes.

Horton considers her collaged interiors to be metaphors for the way we construct homes, lives, even our worldviews, from what’s available to us. Thus, the name of the show, “Patchwork and Frankenstein.” Sometimes the results are endearing and cozy, like patchwork quilt; at other times, the mix yields a less desirable result.

“Frankenstein’s monster is also a patchwork and it’s hideous, right? I was thinking about the extreme of those things,” Horton muses. “In the work there’s areas where maybe the patterns don’t match up or you see the linear perspective but then they kind of jog and zig and zag so it’s imperfect, which I think is true of most of our lives.”

If you go

What: “Patchwork and Frankenstein,” mixed-media work by Mandy Rogers Horton

Before the crowd arrived for last week’s First Saturday Art Crawl, two people walked around The Arts Company scrutinizing “The New Nashville: Paintings by Brett Weaver.” One left owning a picture; the other with notes and a touch of envy.

Brett Weaver’s paintings are on view through Nov. 22. He’ll discuss the series during a gallery event 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. Saturday (RSVP to 615-254-2040).

Weaver depicts familiar intersections, restaurant interiors and new elements of Nashville’s cityscape in a number of painting styles, including one blending Charles Sheeler’s geometric architectural style with Edward Hopper’s use of rich color.

Skies in Weaver’s street scenes are snatches of abstract paintings while his interiors are warm and glowing, with heavily textured canvases covered in thick applications of paint and the artist’s marks.

Weaver’s small, impressionistic street scenes of the Franklin Theater and First Bank Downtown are beautifully finished in gold-toned frames.

The Arts Company is at 215 Fifth Ave. N. and is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Admission is free. For information, call 615-254-2040 or go to theartscompany.com.

Upstairs in its recently reconfigured client space, The Arts Company is displaying a suite of new prints by Lonnie Holley.

"He's willing to try anything," said Anne Brown, the gallery's owner.

Brown described Holley's prints as magical, adding that it's an art form she normally doesn't exhibit. She was, however, happy to make an exception for these.

The works were created at the Bay Area's Paulson Bott Press last fall.

Intaglio or engraved prints are a new medium for the Atlanta-based Holley, a self-trained visual artist who is also an acclaimed musician. Holley also recently created a piece of sculpture for Edmonson Park that will be dedicated on Aug. 20.

Holley uses found material in his work. In the prints, he arranged random collections of items on printing plates to form abstract or representational images.

A video made by Paulson Bott Press shows Holley building a sculpture that became "Our Journey," a print of a tall-sail vessel on choppy seas.

"The Things of Life (To See or Not To See)" is a series of three prints that resemble photograms with strong interplays of negative and positive space. A razor blade, pen cap, pencil, coil and plant matter are some of the discernible objects in the designs.

In "Obstacles Before the Goal II," a ghostly soccer ball is positioned behind an airy, floating net.

The prints will be on view through Sept. 6 at The Arts Company, 215 Fifth Ave. N. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. For information call 615-254-2040 or go to theartscompany.com.

"My wife is a writer and she says I need to do better on my titles," Daryl Thetford said. The Chattanooga-based photographer creates digital collages, scenes of a man standing in a red rowboat ("Man in a Boat Alone") or another man sitting in a chair ("Man in a Chair)."

But there is also "Trying Not To Try." In the scene, two men sit at opposite ends of a table, a ball balanced on the surface between them.

The collage is based on a book by the same title that discusses a game in which two people try to use alpha and theta waves to repel the ball.

"I thought it was an interesting metaphor and a funny metaphor about trying to access different states," Thetford said.

Always looking

Backgrounds in his work seem to be moving streams of data and text that are almost dissolving before one's eyes.

"His work is visually striking, contemporary, full of visual energy," said Anne Brown, owner of The Arts Company.

"The World of Daryl Thetford," his first show at the gallery, remains on view through Aug. 8. Thetford will discuss his work during a gallery event at 5:30 Friday. That event is free, but reservations are required (art@theartscompany.com or call the gallery).

Thetford's color-drenched digital photo collages are each composed of bits of up to 100 photographs.

His massive archive contains close-ups of graffiti mixed with rust on rail cars, faded signage, old posters. Weathered patinas and intriguing textures catch his eye, though he now often leaves his camera home, especially when traveling.

"Otherwise I'm just constantly looking, and it can really ruin the trip," he said.

Work has 'strong voice'

He refers to himself as fairly obsessive — you'd almost have to be to create these collages — yet his image archive isn't meticulously labeled and organized.

"It's sadly much more primitive than that," Thetford said. Still, he knows how to find everything.

That comes in handy when putting together things such as "Branding Day at the Bird Ranch," a fun, brightly colored composition of a sunglass-wearing cowboy rounding up the flock of grackles at his feet while standing Marlboro Man-tall.

The cowboy was doing rope tricks in Fort Worth, Texas; Thetford replaced his face with that of a friend (he liked the campiness of the sunglasses). One of Thetford's own hands stands in for the the fast-moving cowboy's blurred one.

Thetford photographed the grackles in a park on that same Texas trip. He added Chinese characters on their feathers and, in fact, words run all through the background of the picture, some in English, some in Chinese.

Other text was sourced from paper stuck on a gas pump, part of a circus sign and writing from a chalkboard at a produce stand. The large stars in the collage's top half were plucked from an old sign.

"That image, like a lot of images, started out as: I'm going to make a simple image; it's going to be pared down; it's going to be a lot of negative space," Thetford said. "But really, that's not how my mind works a lot of the times."

As for what comes next, Thetford prefers to let his work evolve without too much interference from, well, him.

"Even though it's difficult for my controlling nature, I try to let the work have a strong voice," he said. "Where does it seem to be leading me. … It becomes a dialog with the artwork; to me that's the most important thing."